There are all kinds of reasons to question the Obama administration’s decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and four al Qaeda accomplices in a U.S. civilian court. Many of the key ones are spelled out by AEI colleague John Yoo today in the Wall Street Journal.
Yet another one has popped up, captured in a Toronto Star editorial today. Under the title of “Tainted Trial for Khadr,” the paper argues that “Canadians should be appalled that five Al Qaeda suspects in the 9/11 mass murder of nearly 3,000 people in New York will get a fair trial in U.S. civilian court, while a Canadian, Omar Khadr, will stand trial before a tainted military panel for allegedly killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15.” Although the paper’s assessment that the military tribunals are “tainted” is more a reflection of the paper’s pandering to the Canadian Left than an accurate description of the military court, and it ignores the fact that the law Khadr broke was not U.S. domestic law but the laws of war, the fact is that KSM and friends are being given rights the young Canadian will not have. Of course, the point is not that Khadr deserves access to those rights but that KSM and the four other terrorists don’t. What they did was wage war on the United States and by treating their activities as principally a crime the Obama administration will have created a tangled set of expectations that will make dealing with the threat of jihadist terrorism more difficult, not less.